ALTSTAEDT PLAYS HAYDN & TCHAIKOVSKY
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centr
Monday June 17, 2024
Nicolas Altstaedt
Taking over for this national round from the ACO’s artistic director Richard Tognetti, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt offered two of the major constituents in his instrument’s repertoire: Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations without the original’s ten wind players, and Haydn’s C Major Concerto with a first movement cadenza that I’ve never heard (I suspect, probably unjustifiably, that it was Altstaedt’s own.
So the night’s title was expertly realized by an expert and gifted performer. Of course, the rest of the entertainment was taken up with other musical scraps that seemed to me to have no congruence with the two soloist-highlighting works. We heard the first and last movements from Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ – Introduzione and Il terremoto. The orchestra revisited an old favourite in Sandor Veress’ Four Transylvanian Dances with its boot-stomping finale. More fragments emerged with three movement’s from Kurtag’s aphoristic Officium breve in memoriam Andrae Szervanszky, and just before Haydn’s urbane concerto, Altstaedt conducted Aroura by Xenakis, written in 1971 and packed with those compositional and sound-production devices so beloved of the last real avant-garde that flourished in Europe before the advent of our current conservative vapidity.
As you can see, this program was an inexplicable mixture involving juxtapositions and blendings that brought to mind several of Tognetti’s own melanges. Added to this, I’m not a fan of scraps – a few movements of Haydn, a selection from Kurtag; the whole intended to be a kind of mutually fertilizing garden of doubtful delights. All right: you can’t expect an interwoven tapestry all the time, but I was struggling to see how one fragment led to another . . . I was going to say ‘in the first half of the evening’, but the neighbourliness of Xenakis and Haydn didn’t come through.
Which is not to deny that Altstaedt is an exciting cellist to hear, striking at the outset for his expansive dynamic which we first met in the Tchaikovsky variations. Here was a display of clean technique coupled with the soloist’s ability to disappear into the ACO blend and then emerge effortlessly from the ruck. He pulled a few impressive flights of legerdemain in the improbably fast Allegro vivo Variation 4, then wove a generous cantabile line in the following Andante grazioso.
He surprised by giving the whole fabric a purpose, almost a continuous forward-thrusting impetus that made the cadenzas and solo links a good deal more sensible than usual – probably because he showed an unflustered mastery of them, without having to strain after effects. Just as importantly, Alstaedt found the underlying good humour in the score and gave it free rein, including a swagger to his line’s more orotund moments. For all that, I missed the wind timbres, particularly in their contributions to those pleasant rounding-out phrases, e.g. bars 16 to 21 of the theme statement and Variation 1, bars 20 to 25 of Variation 2. bars 23 to 25 of Variation 3, etc. Not to mention their support as a group and in individual complementary solos in Variations 4 and 6.
With the Haydn concerto, Altstaedt showed a similar mastery, mainly in his line-shaping where he was able to impose/insert subtle tempo discrepancies to give the slightest pause on a particular note. Just as remarkable was the ACO’s communal consciousness of these hesitations and rubato interpolations, allowing room for them each time. The cellist generated an appealing vocal quality in his account of the central adagio, reserving the power of his opening C until bar 18, then infusing his demisemiquaver written-out ornaments with splendid contralto character. In fact, this almost compensated for the feisty presto pace of the final Allegro molto where the accent fell heavily on an improbably brisk account of the soloist’s semiquaver-rich line like the patch between bars 87 and 94, and later the massive stretch from bar 118 to bar 146.
Not as prominently as in the Tchaikovsky, the missing four wind lines here proved less debilitating; well, they don’t appear at all in the central slow movement. Nevertheless, you missed the oboes’ bite and the horn pair’s binding texture in the first movement. Still, it’s a big ask for the orchestra to bring along ten extra musicians to supplement the core ACO of 17.
Apart from his concerto appearances and the Xenakis conundrum, Altstaedt took Timo-Veikko Valve’s position as principal cello for the evening’s concerted works, appearing to share chairing honours with long-time second violin principal Helena Rathbone standing in at Tognetti’s usual spot.
The opening pages to Haydn’s meditations on the Passion found the ACO in fair form with some remarkably soft passages, the texture feather-light when compared with the determination of the opening two strophes and their reappearance through these concentrated 51 bars. Immediately, we moved to Kurtag’s three brief aphorisms, starting with a fierce bite in his Grave, molto sostenuto fourth movement before the just-as-aggressive Disperato, vivo and the Webern-suggestive (but only partly: that final threnody is much too hearts-on-sleeve for the master of the subtle inflection) Arioso interrotto which are the work’s final two sections.
This last moved straight into the Earthquake of Haydn’s string quartet: a finely ordered seismic eruption, here given at a striking presto pace and with a wealth of dynamic interest. With the Transylvanian Dances, we are in all-too-familiar country, a land superbly tilled by Bartok and Kodaly, here enjoying a kind of mild regrafting. It’s not that these pieces are lacking in colour or vitality; the simple observation is that, when it comes to rebooting folk tunes and dances, Veress’ senior colleagues were more able. Of course, this performance proved to be convincing and adroit, those cursive melodies delivered with the ACO’s trademark gusto and poise. Still, these dances have been in the ensemble’s repertoire for many years, so you’d expect expertise in spades.
Not necessarily the case with the Xenakis score which asks for 4 first violins, 3 seconds, pairs of violas and cellos and a single double bass. Altstaedt oversaw a slightly expanded set of upper strings and encouraged all participants to take to their work with heightened ferocity – more starkly so than in any recorded version I’ve come across. I’m not one to find fault with the Greek composer’s mathematical allocation of responsibilities and devotion to minutiae but this particular construct lacks that shock element and staggering force that strikes me as typical of the best Xenakis.
Of course, all the technical tricks are there, including an arresting mesh of glissandi right at the start, harmonics galore, playing on or above the bridge, dynamic levels from gratingly loud to scarcely audible, quasi-aleatoric stretches of bars – and, above all, dissonance intended to scour the ear. It’s an impressive sound-scape and a nice palate-cleanser in the middle of a staid sequence of events. Yet, while (as always) admiring the performance elegance of this ensemble, I couldn’t help thinking, at the end of Aroura, ‘Is that it? Is that all?’
O'Connell the Music 